Programming Praxis

We studied McNugget Numbers in a previous exercise. You may recall that McDonald’s Restaurants sell Chicken McNuggets in meal sizes of 6, 9 or 20 nuggets, and a McNugget Number is a number that can be formed by some combination of 6, 9 and 20. For instance, 100 is a McNugget Number because 100 = 5 ·20.

The previous exercise asked you to find the list of numbers that cannot be formed by some combination of 6, 9 and 20; those numbers, which are the Non-McNugget Numbers, are 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 7, 8, 10, 11, 13, 14, 16, 17, 19, 22, 23, 25, 28, 31, 34, 37 and 43. Today’s exercise asks you to count the ways in which a McNugget number can be formed; for instance, you can form the number 100 in 5 different ways: 100 = 0 · 6 + 0 · 9 + 5 · 20 = 1 · 6 + 6 · 9 + 2 · 20 = 4 · 6 + 4 · 9 + 2 · 20 = 7 · 6 + 2 · 9 + 2 · 20 = 10 · 6 + 0 · 9 + 2 · 20.

Your task is to write a program that calculates the number of ways a number can be expressed as a McNugget Number, and to use your program to calculate the number of ways to express one million as a McNugget Number. When you are finished, you are welcome to read or run a suggested solution, or to post your own solution or discuss the exercise in the comments below.

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